The NYTimes wrote an article about product placement in books. Apparently, Cover Girl has a deal with the young adult novel, Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233, which is coming out in September:

As it turns out, Lipslicks is a line of lip gloss made by Cover Girl, which has signed an unusual marketing partnership with Running Press, the unit of Perseus Books Group that is publishing the novel [Cathy’s Book].

Cover Girl, which is owned by the consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, has neither paid the publisher nor the book’s authors, Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, for the privilege of having their makeup showcased in the novel. But Procter will promote the book on Beinggirl.com, a Web site directed at adolescent girls that has games, advice on handling puberty and, yes, makeup tips.

Also:

But such deals are not unprecedented. Five years ago, Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, paid Fay Weldon an undisclosed amount to feature the brand prominently in her novel, entitled — what else? — “The Bulgari Connection.”

The book industry is definitely going in this direction. I don’t like it. In a TV show, you can have an actress drinking a coke without drawing attention away from what’s going on around her. In a book, you have to describe the coke, thus spending valuable words explaining why the coke is there. So, simply by virtue of how writing works, it would be difficult to put a product placement in a book without affecting the creative content of the story.

Books are one of the few sources of entertainment that are relatively untouched by commercialism. On TV, the threat to pull advertising rules the content of many shows. Do we want that kind of thing getting into our books?

Also, I wonder what product placement would do to the relationship between writer and reader. Reading someone’s book is a kind of trust–you’re trusting that the writer can be entertaining, can take you through a story, and has something to say. So what happens if your storyteller starts folding advertising into her story? How does that change your trust in that storyteller, and, if it happened enough, all storytellers?

I just think it’s a dangerous trend. Once publishers find a successful way to do product placement and start getting a taste of the kind of money advertising can generate… well, it’s only a matter of time until Breakfast at Tiffany’s II: Diamonds Equal Love makes its way onto a bookshelf near you.